pidof

PIDOF(8) Linux System Administrator’s Manual PIDOF(8)

NAME

pidof -- find the process ID of a running program.

SYNOPSIS

pidof [-s] [-c] [-x] [-oomitpid] [-oomitpid..] program [program..]

DESCRIPTION

Pidof finds the process id’s (pids) of the named programs. It prints
those id’s on the standard output. This program is on some systems used
in run-level change scripts, especially when the system has a System-V
like rc structure. In that case these scripts are located in
/etc/rc?.d, where ? is the runlevel. If the system has a start-stop-daemon (8) program that should be used instead.

OPTIONS

-s Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one pid.
-c Only return process ids that are running with the same root
directory. This option does not make sense for non-root users,
as they will be unable to check the current root directory of
processes they do not own.
-x Scripts too - this causes the program to also return process
id’s of shells running the named scripts.
-o Tells pidof to omit processes with that process id. The special
pid %PPID can be used to name the parent process of the pidof
program, in other words the calling shell or shell script.

NOTES

pidof is simply a (symbolic) link to the killall5 program, which should
also be located in /sbin.
When pidof is invoked with a full pathname to the program it should
find the pid of, it is reasonably safe. Otherwise it is possible that
it returns pids of running programs that happen to have the same name
as the program you’re after but are actually other programs.